I keep writing these extremely long journal entries and then
waiting a month to write the next one.

Post-Halloween:
Helix and friends held a really cool Halloween party about
two weeks after Halloween (around mid-November) at an
American Legion meeting house or something. It was a nice
clash of realities, because you had to drive to this
clubhouse that looked like it would be the Royal Order of
the Water Buffalo, but when we got closer, it was definitely
a Halloween party, with cool lights, DJs, the whole nine yards.

I wore my "salesman" costume again, but this time powdered
up my face and wore black lipstick: Death of a Salesman!
(pause for big laffs) Josh went way futuro, with plastic
clothing and glo-sticks and glo-stars glues all over him. I
played Yatsura's "Glo-stars" song while he was gluing them
on, natch. Andrew, Jay, and Gary just went as themselves,
happening people that they are. I met up with a bunch of
people I hadn't seen in a long time, including Doron, and I
met a bunch of new people I have no hope of remembering.

Life:
I have no life. Andrew is really getting into cooking
lately, and not just things like mac & cheese or ravioli.
He's cooking ambitious things like pot roast, pepper steak,
and leg of lamb. Things that cause vegetarians to recoil in
horror. But the strange thing is that most of them turn out
great! Since he stays at Rob's a lot, frequently we will go
over there on weekend mornings and cook breakfast: pancakes,
bacon, biscuits & gravy, egg scrambles, and coffee. This is
practically the definition of a weekend morning for me.

Rabbit flew in on Saturday morning and we spent most of the
past weekend practicing, with a few breaks for food and to
go up to the Red Vic to watch Hedwig and the Angry
Inch again. We actually practiced 21 songs, which is
far more than we could do in a single set, but since we're
playing two shows (Friday and Saturday), we'll probably just
do different songs on different nights. We're sounding a
lot better, I think, and this time I'm playing bass a lot
more, so I'm trying to do that more competently.

Strick came in a week or so ago, but he's been pretty busy
catching up with everyone since he got here -- I think this
is his first visit since the spring! Somehow he and Commie
have gotten on bad terms, so Commie's been peeing on
Strick's stuff and scratching him when he's around. I don't
know why, but I wonder if maybe Commie can sense that Strick
always forgets he's a boy-cat and calls him "she". ;)

After @Home died, Andrew got fed up with cable modem service
entirely, so I hooked him and Strick together and he joined
the LLIC. It was the first time I'd been to it since it
moved to Brat's basement, and it reminded me that I should
join, as soon as I build a new scrap machine.

Was the defining change of the 90s... the internet? It
sounds so trite and oversold, but maybe because there's a
kernel of truth in it. Maybe that really was the
most important change of the decade.

I was talking to a friend who said he thought the 90s was
the decade that had the most change of the past half
century, and I was pretty surprised: to me, the 90s seemed
very static and stable. The 80s, on the other hand, seem
like a time of constant change and turmoil. Maybe
perception about this is biased by what decade you grew up in?

Something that's been floating around for so long that I
can't really attribute it is the idea that decades begin on
defining moments that change everything. For example, right
now it seems like the zeros definitively began on 11 Sep
2001: everything that happened in 2000 and the first half of
2001 was really just the trailing end of the 90s. The
people I've discussed this with have generally agreed that
the 90s began in Nov 1989 with the fall of the Berlin wall,
and that the 80s began in Jan 1981 with the inauguration of
Ronald Reagan.

Most people also agree that 22 Nov 1963 started the 60s, but
there's not a lot of agreement on when the 70s started. My
personal opinion is that they began when Nixon resigned, in
Aug 1974. That means that some decades begin and end a few
years before or after a strictly mathematical decade would,
but since we're describing cultural shifts, I think that's
okay. Non-Americans right now are grumbling that 3 of the 5
decade-changing events I mentioned were of interest only to
Americans (all 3 involving presidents): global citizens are
free to pick their own dates, but I think a lot of these
events (especially Reagan's presidency) directly affected
the entire world.

To me, the 80s changed everything: the personal computer,
the huge resurgence of conservativism, drab earth colors
replaced by bright primary colors. Tons of things got
built. The global political climate changed dramatically.
Music exploded from 2-3 genres to about 20. Space travel
became so commonplace that most people weren't watching the
Challenger launch until after it exploded. We were
told we'd have a space station by 1991, no problem. The US
and Japan were feeding off each other's rampant
technological growth and it would never end. The government
went from fiscal responsibility to near bankruptcy.

I remember constantly feeling that all rational thought had
died and been replaced by gut reactions and responses based
on religion or ideology. (Has this changed, or have I just
become more used to it?) Religious movements flourished and
everyone expected the world to end in a nuclear holocaust
tomorrow. You can see it in the way houses from
the 80s are already falling apart: people back then did not
expect the world as we know it to still exist in 2001.
(R.E.M. summed it up in 1987.)

The image that represents the end of the 80s to me is when,
on the night of 9 Nov 1989, the TV in my bedroom stopped
showing partying Germans for a few moments to jump to the
White House to get President Bush's reaction. He actually
didn't know what had happened, so he was being told while
the cameras were on him, and his reaction summed up the 80s
perfectly to me: confusion! He wasn't happy, he was
confused, and possibly a bit troubled! It was one of those
moments where the mask is pulled off and you see the true
meaning of everything, and his face said it all: "We didn't
mean for this to happen! This isn't a war we were supposed
to win! It was just a distraction!"

I feel like a person from 1980 who jumped in a time machine
and arrived in 1991 would be completely lost and without
bearings -- that much had changed. But someone who jumped
from 1990 to 2001 would probably only need to adjust to
minor cultural shifts in entertainment. Except -- my
friends who grew up in the 90s are probably right: the
internet which is now so ever-present that most people don't
bother to mention it was barely even heard of by most
people. And so maybe that change alone is dramatic enough
to mark a decade.

On Tuesday (30th), Arlo invited a bunch of friends and
Eazelites to Riace's pre-Halloween dinner. Andrew and I
patched things up and I invited him along, and we just kinda
enjoyed the spectacle. It was pretty surreal: many people
were dressed up, and the wine was flowing very freely.
There was a DJ station set up at the back, which would play
classical music for a while, then Arlo would take over and
play dancy stuff, and then when he left it would revert
again. One night segue was Front 242 going into Van Halen's
"Jump". It was very much like we were in a movie, but we
couldn't figure out what kind of movie.

Then yesterday, Gary announced that he was going up to SF to
see the Halloween festivities, since he'd never been before.
I hadn't been in a few years, so I tagged along. Arlo
promised to go with us, in drag, if he didn't have to drive,
but when I took him up on this offer he bailed. :) Feeling
uninspired, I decided to go as a salesman: I never dress up
for anything anyway, so it seemed like a fun idea. I
skipped out of work after lunch and Andrew & I went shopping
at Target and Walmart and Ross -- all the k00l places. Ross
was simply amazing! I think we stayed in the tchotchke
aisle for a half hour until finally even I had had
enough and had to drag Andrew away from cuckoo-clock candle
holders kicking and screaming.

I was somewhat amused to find out that I had a functional
tie, but no decent dress shirt.

Gary was dressed as a punk, with a sleeveless shirt, leather
vest, studded collar, and gelled-white spikey hair. His
friend Josh*e was a raverboy, with patched jeans, white fur,
white hair (with 2 little cat ears), and blue/white makeup.
Sharon was a dark princess, with a poofy/lacey black dress
and this neet glittery makeup that only twinkled randomly in
certain light. There were a bunch of other people, too,
whose names I can't possibly remember: One was the Memento
guy, one was a Soggy Bottom Boy (from "O Brother, Where Art
Thou?"), etc etc. The Memento guy was well done and even
sorta looked like him in the face a little. He
walked around with a polaroid, taking pictures of people in
the crowd and then writing on the polaroid things like "They
have lost someone too."

Parking was miraculously easy (someone has good karma) but
the crowds were incredibly dense and booze was hard to come
by, so I took my leave of Gary's friends briefly to trot my
corporate-tool self over to a party Eskil's ex-neighbors
were having. As I got close, I realized that having a
Hallowe'en party 2 blocks from Castro @ Market is clearly an
invitation for civic unrest. There were way more people
than could possibly fit in the tiny livingroom, and random
drunkards and homeless people (ready for Hallowe'en without
costume) joined in.

I missed Eskil and his date, but Dan was there (dressed as a
devil, with electric glowing pitchfork and red tail) and I
accompanied him to the corner store to fetch more alcohol
for the party. I've never seen drinks go so fast: after all
the plastic cups and coffee mugs were used up, people were
sipping mixed drinks out of cereal bowls. Ian soon
re-appeared, dressed as the crocodile hunter. Fearing his
costume wasn't obvious enough, he also brought along an
inflatable kangaroo, which was a hit with the women. After
I'd had some drinks, said hi to people, and sized up the
barely controlled chaos, I took leave and re-entered the
larger, uncontrolled chaos.

No fewer than three people were dressed as DuffMan. I was
incredulous at the first one and then just stunned by the
time I saw the third. At least two letters of anthrax (one
with a cute Osama bin-Laden stamp), and one bottle of Cipro.
Four guys dressed in foam outfits of Pac-man, Ms. Pac-man,
and two of the ghosts. A he and she robot that were
absolutely amazing (little lights and "danger" meters and
everything!), a shy Andy Warhol, a giant Vanilla
car air freshener, some Tron characters, and way too many
drag queens.

Once it was deemed to be "over", a solid line of police with
clubs started wedging open the street and telling everyone
to go home. I dunno where they came from because there had
been almost no cops up till that point, but I felt kinda
sorry for them because closing down the party is probably
the least enjoyable part of their work, and they were being
really good about doing it in a way that didn't piss people off.

I didn't get back home till about 3.30, and today I started
to feel bad about how little work I got done yesterday,
until I realized that Hallowe'en really should be a holiday
anyway. I mean who cares about Columbus Day anyway?

I don't want to write anything about the WTC because I'm
sick of hearing about it. It's all anyone's talked about in
the past two days. I'm also sick of hearing some people get
really nationalistic and haughty in reaction, and others
saying the US deserves it because the US government does not
always make 100% perfect decisions. You all suck, argument
over.

At the end of August, I went to Washington DC to visit my
friends Nathan and Rabbit, and I had a really great time. I
never go clubbing out here (because I hate the people and
the music), but they took me out on each of the 3 nights I
was there. It wasn't so bad: I still hated the music, but
Nathan and Rabbit's friends were fun so I still had a good
time. One night they dressed me up in A&F clubwear and put
gel in my hair just to see what I'd look like if I was an
aging club kid. It wasn't very pretty. Also we went to a
Popeye's and had fried chicken and biscuits and gravy!

Shows I saw recently:
American Analog Set: Excellent. I recognized most of the
songs they played (even though I only got into them
recently, through
mfleming) and they played all
the songs of the new album (which I like best) that I wanted
to hear, except "Aaron & Maria". They had a t-shirt stand
but apparently hid it in the back in an unusual place, so I
missed it. No t-shirt for Robey.

Belle & Sebastian: Not too bad. The first half of the show
didn't do much for me, maybe because I was behind two very
annoying fans. I think I decided that I don't like B&S fans
very much and that I needed to see B&S exactly once -- these
guys had taken something special & chemical before the show
and were pleading with everyone around to do "funny dances"
to the songs and "show love" for B&S. And they wouldn't
shut up! Finally I scooted away from them and enjoyed the
2nd half much more. Having never been to the Warfield
before, I didn't realize that the main floor would be
intensely packed, so I tried not to let all the cramming and
jostling get to me, but I realized that I really have gotten
spoiled by going to mostly smaller shows, and enjoy those
much more.

My ex appeared at the show unexpectedly, so I tried to deal
with it. For most of the night, we seemed to be getting
along just fine, and I thought things would be okay. We
even talked a little bit one-on-one about new CDs and
Blaxploitation movies. But then on the ride back to my car,
he just snapped and started yelling. My friends called
(trying to meet at a bar after the show) and I had to call
back because he wouldn't stop yelling at me. We've been
broken up for over 2 months -- I thought the bullshit would
be over. I was kinda bummed the rest of the night. I guess
with some people there is never a reconciliation (you'd
think from his behavior that I dumped him
instead of vice-versa) and you just have to cut them out and
move on. It still makes me sad, though.

Just to end this on a positive note, our water heater broke
Monday night. I went without a decent shower (except for a
quickie at a friend's house yesterday night) and it looked
like a new one was being installed this morning, so I'm
looking forward to going home tonight and taking a nice hot
shower.

So I ended up missing that Poundsign/Fairways show because I
was so exhausted on that day that I took a "nap" for 4-5
hours and slept right through it. That's pretty indicative
of how my month has been going so far, actually.

say2/jabber:
Work has been going as well as it can, I think. We decided
to try out Jabber as a potential backend to some chat stuff
we've been working on, so I got to check out what I see as
the only real contender to say2 so far. They have a lot
working, but a lot of it seems pretty half-assed and
incomplete. I was left with the feeling that I was looking
at the remnants of a "commercial open-source" project in the
aftermath of the boom: a lot of construction that stopped
midway and hasn't really received much TLC since then. When
I ran into problems trying to get my Jabber adaptor working,
I wasn't able to find much of a support structure left: a
public jabber-chat channel with a few silent stragglers, and
some empty webpages that haven't been updated recently. I
suspect that they're like Nautilus, trying to adapt to a
suddenly much smaller environment.

It did give me some ideas and motivation for say2,
though. That, and Scott's nagging, finally got me to start
implementing the say2 equivalent of "buddy lists". I
thought the concept was pretty simple, so I could hammer out
an implementation in one night -- very very wrong. So far
I've worked on it off and on at nights all week long, and
I'm only a little over half done. The concepts turn out to
be pretty straightforward, but the implementation involves a
lot of corner cases and new lookup tables. I hope to have
the implementation basically done within another week, and
to float out a trial release of jenova for clients to try out.

plaid:
Last weekend I went up to the city to see what has been my
favorite band for most of the last year: Plaid. Arlo called
it "the day of the ex's" because he'd been hanging out with
his ex Erin all day before the show, and we went to the show
with my ex Greg. I had a really bad impression of Bimbo's
from the last time I'd been there (crammed full of fratboys
and no beer on top, only a few bottles), but this time there
were far fewer people there because the headliner band
(Squarepusher) had cancelled. They still had no beer on
tap, though. Arlo and Greg holed up in a corner talking
through all of the opening acts, so I sat bored and annoyed
until some freaks stood right in my face and I gave up and
stood in the front, just in time to see Plaid set up. They
were awesome! It was worth the annoyance of dealing with SF
traffic and people in a way that few things could be:
awesomely weird videos played to new mixes of some of their
best songs, with over 1/3 of the songs being ones I hadn't
heard before. If you ever get a chance, you must go see
Plaid do their act.

Plaid did not do an encore. Either this is some artsy
"elctronica bands do not do encores" thing, or else they
weren't prepared because they expected to be opening for
Squarepusher. I hope it's the latter because I can't bear
to think of Plaid taking themselves too seriously or
pretending to be arty.

life:
I have no life. But with the roomie gone for two weeks,
I've had an amazingly relaxing time. When I clean things,
they stay clean. The kitchen being relatively clean
actually inspired me to start trying cooking again, too.
And I finally bought FFIX and started playing it obsessively
(but trying to keep it down to one hour a night). I was
hanging out with some hardcore stoners for a while, but I
figured out that they weren't any more laid back than anyone
else: if anything, they're more dramatic and mood swingy.
Also Commie (my cat) has finally decided that he trusts me
enough to sleep next to my head, which is weird but somehow
comforting, as long as I don't suffocate.

Also I'm reading a book called Gravity's Rainbow by
Thomas Pynchon. I bought it because I'd liked a much later
book by the same author, and had heard good things about
this one -- I had no idea it was so controversial. The
first 100-200 pages were sometimes tough to read through,
because he gets distracted a lot and spins 20-page yarns
about something completely unrelated before returning to the
plot, but as I've kept reading, I've gotten more and more
enmeshed in it. Some rudimentary web searching turned up
interesting info on the book that only made me more
intruiged: Apparently in 1973, the judges of the Pulitzer
Prize decided that Gravity's Rainbow should win
that year. But the trustees were so frightened by the
prospect that they declared there would be no prize
awarded that year! To me that sounds more amazing than
actually winning the prize!

I suck at writing journal entries, don't I? Oh well.
Simultaneously a lot and not a lot has happened since the
last time I wrote anything meaningful, but I'm not sure I
have the patience to describe it all.

Monday I went to the Bottom of the Hill to see Kissing
Contest, a cool local indie band that seems to contain a lot
of my coworkers @ Danger in it. Wasn't sure what to expect
until I listened to some mp3s the day before, and then I was
pretty impressed. Live, they were pretty tight, and the
songs were catchy and infectious without being simple. They
were the first band of 3 playing that night, and at the
beginning of the set, their co-workers and ex-co-workers
(from Be, I think) made up about 1/3 of the crowd. By the
end of their set, it was much less -- a bunch of people were
drawn in. The following band didn't quite manage to live up
to their opening act.

Some overdressed guy with a blond frat haircut was doing
incredibly strange gyrations across the floor while they
were playing. Didn't recognize him as a Danger person, so I
thought, maybe he's a Be person? He was really getting into
the songs, though he seemed to not know them very well.
Then he did the same thing for the next band, and I found
out that nobody knows who this dude is -- just took some bad
drugs before the show I guess. People were literally moving
a few meters away from him to keep from being a victim of a
random spasm.

Wednesday I went back to see Mark Robinson, with Calvin
Johnson and Whysall Lane. Didn't recognize the last two
names, but wanted to see Mark Robinson, and I was pretty
sure maybe Calvin Johnson had sung along with Lush and
Heavenly before. Walt allowed himself to be dragged along
merely on the basis that he liked a few Unrest songs and
took my word for it that Mark Robinson had been in Unrest.
Well, Whysall Lane turned out to be Richard-of-Versus, with
an occasional friend, doing mostly acoustic stuff. It was
cool! Never thought I'd get to see Versus, or even a subset
of Versus, on the east coast. Then Calvin Johnson came on,
and after the first song or two, I thought, "He sounds
really a lot like the guy from Beat Happening." Well I'm a
dork cause it soon became obvious that yes, he was the guy
from Beat Happening -- the show turns out to be a veritable
all-star lineup! His set was cool, though I only recognized
one song he played (a Beat Happening song, natch).

Finally, Mark Robinson. Wacky wacky guy. He did no
recognizable Flin Flon songs, but did several that he
claimed were from his recent solo album (or albums?!) that
I'd never heard of. (I picked one up after the show but
haven't listened yet.) The crowd seemed more bemused by him
than adoring; even when he played "I Hate Milk" and
"Isabel", most people seemed to not recognize the songs.
(How exactly did they hear about him if not through Air
Miami or Unrest? The crowd was not very large.) He invited
Calvin Johnson up to sing "Make-Out Club", which was
hilarious, because Calvin obviously didn't know many of the
lyrics, but had fun making up stuff and throwing Mark off so
bad that a few times he was laughing too much to track where
he was in the song. Then Mark invited Richard up, and the
two of them did a two-guitars/two-voices duet of "She Makes
Me Shake Like A Soul Machine", a really old Unrest song that
I love and never imagined I'd see live. Richard
did know the words, and they both played/sang it
really beautifully. Very very cool. I doubt there are many
people who would've enjoyed a show like this, so I was
pretty gushed out that it could even exist.

Saturday, I go back again (3rd trip in a week) to see the
Fairways and Poundsign, and possibly drag some of the 3440
crowd with me too -- whee!

Here are some bands I've seen recently. Tortoise and Mogwai
were both at the Fillmore, which I've started detesting mor
and more: $20 ticket price, Ticketbastard instead of
Ticketweb, no decent beer on tap, lots of fratboys that
don't know anything about the band that's playing. Since
these shows usually sell out a week or three ahead of time,
I'm left wondering why drunken fratboys are paying $20 3
weeks ahead of the show, to see a band they don't know.
Anyway, here's a quick synopsis:

Tortoise: I expected a bunch of older guys (i.e.
my age) puttering around on instruments and maybe
wanking with feedback. Instead they put on a really
brilliant show, doing a lot of songs that i recognized (even
though i didn't remember the song names or anything) and
really just wowing me throughout. Stuff that i thought had
to be studio magic on the CD, they just whipped through on
stage. And they had lots of cool gadgets, like a device
that looked like a harmonica with a vacuum hose attached:
the dude would blow into one end, and the other end was
connected to a keyboard. The end result was a very
harmonica-like sound, but using a keyboard so he had lots of
range. The opening bands were very techno oriented, but
surprisingly good. I was really getting into the last one,
"Nobukazu Takemura".

Mogwai: They're big enough to play at the Fillmore
for two nights, but they seemed a little juvenile this time.
I liked most of the show, but it was all stuff from CODY
and Young Team (except for one song from the new album):
lots of loud fuzz and noise, separated by a soft rendition
of "Cody" that seemed exactly like last time. I'm all into
noise, but their new album is so quiet and different that i
was hoping to see more stuff like that now. Also they were
intent on knocking over drumsets and amps when they left,
like it was 1991 again, and they did the "we're leaving
everything feedbacking" schtick when they left the stage for
the last time. My ears were ringing but it didn't leave a
good taste in my mouth. Honestly i don't remember much else
about the show -- just lots of long drifty feedback and
noise excursions. But they're no Sonic Youth.

The New Pornographers: Aside from 1-2 poppy songs, it
took a while for their one CD to grow on me, so i had no
expectations going in, except that it looked like they'd be
fun people. They sure are. They played every song on the
album (in different order) and there was only one that i
didn't really enjoy when they played it (i won't tell you
which) -- somehow i was really getting into songs that i
only sorta liked on the album. There were even a few extra
songs and covers to fill in for the fact that they basically
have only one album. Neko was present (yay!) and her and
Carl (the other frontman) were both very crowd-friendly and
chatty. I went all fanboy and got a t-shirt and would've
bought other stuff if they'd had anything to sell. The
opening band was a prettboy punkish band from Berkeley, and
they were pretty cool too. Greg swooned and bought their EP.

I feel that some people may be getting annoyed that i
generally use this site as a journal of my own thoughts and
stuff instead of a journal of my tireless efforts to advance
open source software and further the Cause and the Movement.
therefore i will geek out a little bit.

Say2
has finally started seeing more interest and traffic on
the mailing list, and Scott wrote a good beginning of a
native GTK client for it, so i'm very psyched (but now that
i'm employed again, i have less time to work on it). Some
interesting topics have been argued -- the current one being
whether nicknames should be allowed to be in UTF8 like
everything else. Users already have an ascii registered id
that can be used to identify them, so the nickname becomes
just a visible, er... nickname. I'm starting to be
won over to the idea that these should be able to be
expressed in the user's native language. I wonder if any
other chat system has tried that before.

My new server machine (for lag.net) is basically up and
running. Apache and CVS and all that are already on it, and
a half dozen of the users have already been migrated. The
main headache i forsee is moving email. When i first
started wanting to host email, qmail was relatively new, and
sendmail was such a pile of manure that i rushed right into
qmail, with the result that i know almost nothing about
maintaining a mail server that uses sendmail. And after
many years of running qmail, i'm really sick of it. So the
new server machine is running postfix, which i find much
more to my taste. The challenge will be to move all the
qmail config (mailing lists, virtual hosts, restricted smtp
relaying, etc) to postfix. I think i just need to sit down
on some weekend and make a day of it.

New job: Yup, after only a few weeks (and it felt like even
less) I started my new job on 4 June at
Danger.
Of the places i interviewed, this one was my top choice, so
i was pretty happy that it worked out. That's also why i
haven't had a lot of time to do journal entries either.
More later!

It really pisses me off when conservatives claim that the
energy crisis is because of California's desire to conserve
resources and not trash the environment, instead of the
obvious cause: an almost religious belief that because the
western world won the Cold War, extreme capitalism is the
ultimate answer, and we should privatize even basic utilities
like electricity.

I have yet to see a clear line of cause and effect drawn from
environmentalism and conservation to massive power shortages.
But I've seen several very thoughtful articles on how the
rush to deregulate everything in a fit of capitalistic zeal
caused the power crisis to be nearly inevitable.

Of course, it's easy for conservatives to paint broad strokes
and say "since California is having trouble, it must be
because of their differences, like their belief in green
causes". Logic becomes irrelevant, but this is nothing new
to extreme-right arguments. I'm just annoyed that they keep
repeating them, hoping they'll become more convincing with
every retread.

I'm not a liberal. I want lower taxes, a smaller government,
and more local autonomy. But by turning the power crisis
into a California vs. US fight, the east-coast government has
completely alienated me. And probably most other California
moderates.